Monitoring Memory Usage with This Free Memory History Tool

Memory History Tool is a free portable, lightweight system utility that monitors Windows system memory usage in real-time and keeps the historical information that can be exported in a CSV format. If you are having the low-memory issue on your computer or are just wondering if you have sufficient resource to run your day-to-day programs, you may find this tool quite handy and useful.

Since it’s portable, you can download it from the developer’s website and run it right after without any installation process or additional DLL files involved. It only consumes about 3 MB memory, so it is considered light-weighted. It’s recommended to run with elevated privilege, aka Run as Administrator, so that the tool can monitor all the processes including the ones with system rights.

Upon running the tool, it shows up some basic memory usage info right in front of you, such as:

The total memory installed in the system

The available memory at the moment

The current load in percentage

The load history in percentage

The process that uses the memory the most

A graph that displays the memory usage in real-time.

Memory History Tool also has a few other features that make the tool more interesting and useful. It has a Memory Stress feature built in as an item in the autohide-Menu located at the top right corner. Even though it’s currently still in beta, you can definitely try it out to see if your installed memory is up to the task.

It runs for a few minutes and pops up a dialog box with the result, such as the one as below:

The button next to Memory Stress is to bring up the Top Process History window that lists the processes that consume the memory the most. Currently, VMware is the one at the top of the list because I have two virtual machines running at the same time.

And the one next to the Top Process is the one that provides the full list of the running processes on your system. You can easily export the historical data in CSV format for further analysis.

To get a better picture, it’s better to leave the tool to run for a day or even longer to gather enough data for analysis later on. The developer’s website also lists a few scenarios that you may need the assist from Memory History Tool to work with.

Microsoft Windows svchost.exe instances use high memory

Microsoft Windows Update hanging or slow

Your browser eating a lot of memory

Your favorite game suddenly running slow

Your trusted antivirus needs a lot of memory

Your decent computer getting slower and slower

A badly written software eating up all system memory

Memory History Tool is completely free with no usage restriction and works on Windows 7 and above systems with both 32-bit and 64-bit supported.